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Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get resounding, we’re pumping up the league now!”—eight spells in a row that morning. Or possibly it was the 16 spells I overheard Heaven-kissing School Sweet-sounding and High Gymnasium Musical 2 playing on the television in the alive room, or the several hundred dollars my helpmate and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the occurrence that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to half face a Disney tween luminary and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another proclamation had beaten them to it. In conclusion, after my eight-year-old daughter picked to a picture of Hillary Clinton and declared she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, parallel Hilary Duff,” I resolute I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

The aboriginal Disney formula, perfected through multiple generations of anthropomorphic buoyant animals, was uncompounded: Develop demanding divine honors children’s properties—Mickey Catch mice, the Lion Monarch—and then right the characters to within an twelfth part of a foot of their cuddly lives, across many platforms around the ball for vast amounts of dollars, euros, yen, and yuan. Disney gets reliance for conceiving of and executing synergy lengthy before other media conglomerates made it a bad vocable. Yet Disney executives were spoiled by their seasonable success. They became too trusting on aging gay characters and couldn’t replicate the enchantment in the live-movement world. The ensue was a gaping—and dear—opening in Disney’s demographic: While the set excelled at grabbing...

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